Safeguard Measure

Customs

Temporary import restriction to protect domestic industry from a sudden import surge causing serious injury.

Sources

1. World Trade Organization — Safeguard measures wto.org accessed 17 September 2026

The WTO characterises safeguards as “emergency” actions against increased imports that have caused or threaten serious injury to the importing member’s domestic industry — and the threshold is deliberately higher than the one for anti-dumping. Serious injury means “a significant overall impairment in the position of a domestic industry”, and a threat of it must be “clearly imminent as shown by facts, and not based on mere allegation, conjecture or remote possibility”. Safeguards are also time-bound in a way ordinary duties are not: four years initially, and generally not beyond eight in total. The distinction worth holding is that a safeguard responds to a surge in fairly traded imports, where anti-dumping and countervailing duties respond to a specific unfair practice.

These words are the WTO’s own explanatory text, not the agreement itself: the treaty PDFs on wto.org are closed to automated retrieval, so nothing here is presented as a quotation from a treaty article.

Related terms

• Advance Authorisation
• Anti-Dumping Duty
• ATA Carnet
• Authorised Economic Operator
• Bill of Entry
• Binding Tariff Information

From the AJG lexicon archive (July 2026).